Automate On-Premise AD Account Creation with MS Flow

I was recently asked to work on Automating the on-premise Active Directory Account creation. The idea was simple – Hiring manager fills up a form with the required details about the new joinee and submits and then the account should get created in On-premise AD and eventually be synced with Azure AD with required licenses assigned.

The obvious expectation was to use available tools only which come as part of Office 365 E3 license suite.

Implicit Requirements

Even though the stated requirements seem quite straight forward, there were a few implicit ones which had to be taken care of:

The Manager would fill the details like First Name, Last Name, Location, Type of account (normal/contractor) etc. but not the exact details required to create an account in AD like SamAccountName or Email ID. The solution should be able to find/process the required details before the account gets created

There could be duplicate user names, i.e. multiple employees having same First Name and Last Name, so the solution should be able to generate the correct and available SamAccountName, email ID and so on

In most AD structures, users are stored in various Organizational Units (OU), based on their location or Departments etc. So, the application needs to identify in which OU, this new account should be created

The solution should maintain the status of where any given request is currently

You got the idea, the point is, if you are developing this solution for any production environment (not as a POC or an academic exercise), then you need to have some process in between which reads the data entered in the form, processes it and finds out the actual values to be used for Account Creation in On-premise AD.

Solution Approach

Now that we had established, what was required, it was time to look into How can we go about it. Unlike many of my previous articles, I would skip my journey about how I came up with this approach, but would just put a summary. Even though the title of the article says “Automate On-Premise AD Account Creation with MS Flow”, the solution includes a few more components with MS Flow being the heart of it.

We finally decided to use the following components:

SharePoint Lists: We used SharePoint lists as kind of “backend” to store the data submitted by the Form and also to store processed information like SamAccountName, UPN, Email ID, etc.

Microsoft PowerApps: To develop the form which will be filled by the managers. We could have used OOB SharePoint list, but PowerApps allows us to have much more control over what should be shown and how than the OOB list interface.

Microsoft Flow: This is to take care of our data processing requirement and to find out final SamAccountName, UPN, Email ID etc. We used another Flow, just to check if the newly created got synced with Azure AD and to send notification to the request creator that account has been provisioned.

PowerShell: And finally, since MS Flow currently can’t connect with On-Premise Active Directory, we used PowerShell to create the account.

This is how our final solution looks like:

In First Look, this may look a bit overwhelming, but trust me once you go through it, you will find it really as a piece of cake 🙂

So, let’s break it down and take a look at each component in detail.

SharePoint Lists

First step is to create the data sources, i.e. SharePoint Lists. I created a new site collection and ended up creating 3 different lists to store different data, but that’s not required. You can just create two lists

One with all the columns (like First name, Last Name, Location, Department etc.) to capture data from the Form, along with some additional fields like Final SamAccountName, UPN, Email ID etc.

In my solution, I stored the data captured from the Form in List1 and processed data in List2

Everyone who can fill up and submit the Form, needs to have Add/Edit permission on this list

And second to store the initial generated password of newly created account, which needs to be shared with the manager

Only a Service Account account under which the PowerShell runs and the account used by MS Flow – both described later in the article, need to have Read/Write access on this list.

PowerApps Form

Now that we had our so called “backend” data structure ready, it was time to develop a PowerApps Canvas application, to do the basic Add/Update operation on List 1. You can do wonders with PowerApps, but in the most basic form for this requirement, the form could look like this:

You may want to capture some additional details, if you want to automate Office 365 License assignment as well. This can be used to identify which licenses and Services should be enabled to this new account.

And that’s it. complete the form so that when submitted, the data gets stored in the SharePoint list. You can maintain a “Status” column in the list to track the same. When submitted, set the status as “Request Submitted”.

If you want to keep it really simple, you can either use OOB SharePoint list form or customize that New Item form in PowerApps. In my case, a created a new PowerApps Canvas Application.

Microsoft Flow

Since the idea of my solution was to minimize the line of code, so that it comes with less maintenance overhead in future, most of the logic processing part was handed over to flow.

Create a Flow with trigger as Schedule – you can configure it to run based on your business requirement

Use SharePoint “Get Items” Action to read the items from List 1 with filter query as “Status eq Request Submitted”

Use you organization’s Account naming convention to generate SamAccountName, Email ID and UPN

Check the generated names against Azure AD using Azure AD REST API. You can refer this article to find out how to make REST APIs calls to Azure AD.

If the generated account already exists there, loop through and generate another account name. In most organizations, such naming conventions are based on incrementing last character with a digit like second user with name Anupam Shrivastava, gets Shriva02 as account name.

Update the SharePoint list with Final generated and verified SamAccountName, UPN and Email IDs.

Based on your organizational AD structure, find out the OU where the account needs to be created based on the Location or Department field’s values and store that OU in the SharePoint list.

Update the Status as “Account Ready for Creation”, so that the same accounts are not picked up when the Flow runs again.

PowerShell

And finally, we needed PowerShell to actually create the accounts in On-Premise AD. Since, now we already have all the required details like SamAccountName, UPN, Email ID etc. along with the OU where the account needs to be created, we can just go ahead and create those accounts.

Read the SharePoint List and get the items with Status “Account Ready for Creation”

At this stage the account gets successfully created in AD. If you want to Automate Office license assignment as well, you can follow the article “Automate License Assignments in Office 365“. You can see a parameter $Office365License in above script.

Bonus Step

In my case, just creating the account in On-Premise AD was not enough, since the newly created user needed to be able to access Office 365 Services like SharePoint Online sites. So, I decided to have another Flow created, which

Checks if the user became available in Azure AD and marks the status in SharePoint list as “Account Provisioned”

Sends Email Notifications to the manager along with the generated password

And that’s it. The entire Account Provisioning Process now taken about 2 hours compared with 2 days based on earlier process.